Compostable Life Lessons
Sometimes we look back on pivotal moments in our life and imagine how much better things would’ve turned out had we stayed on a particular path.
However, the delays we experience are delays we chose. Whatever lessons we encounter in this life were destined. They may not have been plans made at the beginning of our life, but we learn from every day of living, so there is no such thing as a waste of time. Each day is a treasure.
In February of 2014, I was arrested with my ex for “pot and mushrooms”, as I like to say. He was a bonafide dealer with several tiers of dealers working for him. I was a mushroom enthusiast because I followed Paul Stamets and became fascinated by the power of fungus. Not just the psychedelic power, but also our relationship with other medicinal compounds and the ability they have to decompose our waste. One day I’ll write more on the actual arrest and the process of going through the system, but today I was led to a different thread on that thought.
Six months prior to the arrest, I had been mulling over ideas for a senior research project to complete my biology degree. Though I was still years from graduating, I was the type of non traditional student that was old enough to have learned how to take some initiative from real-world experience. School was where I thrived because (as a gemini rising) information is like a drug for me. Even the job I was working required constant learning about supplements and other products in the “health food industry”.
While taking an Intro to Communications course, I did some research on landfills. To this day, I cannot understand who the fuck thought it was going to be sufficient to gather all of our garbage in one spot and try to get it to decompose. Its a completely asinine solution, but we’ve gotten so used to it that a lot of us don’t think twice about it. I was reminded of this talk on landfills when I found an embarrassing youtube video of it on one of my old accounts. I promptly deleted it but I was still kind of proud of that girl for choosing such a topic to deliver to a class.
(As an aside: It’s funny, now that I think about it-I took communications online and everyone thought that was counterintuitive back then, but now it’s the standard.)
After I did all that research, I could not stop thinking about how much of our waste could be recycled beyond what we were being told could be recycled. Its much easier to recycle organic waste than plastics (hence the move toward bioplastics). This was before I knew where to gather much information on the topic. I was volunteering at a farm and had asked the couple that owned the place if I could start a compost pile there. They were excited about the idea so I tried to develop some plans. The problem with being addicted to gathering information is that you get a lot of amazing ideas that you never act on. So I acted.
I reached out to Veteran Compost with the following email:
Delighted, I said. When I reread this email today, I couldn’t help but feel like that was me from the past trying to get my attention. It felt magical that my current project is Delightfully Taboo and that was the very word I’d used to get advice on a project that I wanted so badly for myself in that part of my life. All that aside, I then remembered how much I’d diverged from this path because I was co-dependent. I was more concerned with maintaining a partnerships and obtaining a degree that I thought would propel me into a well-paid job, doing easy work that I enjoyed. Despair settled into that open space I’d just allowed myself to dive into.
“I could’ve been doing this thing ten years ago,” I thought. An empty feeling developed at the bottom of my esophagus. I began replaying all the awful shit I’ve put myself through. The arrest, sitting in jail, being in an abusive relationship for entirely too long, all the money problems, all the stress, all the wrong turns. Ten whole years to reemerge in this place I left off at as an undergrad.
But then I’d have never experienced the corporate world. In those years of struggling to make it in a fake world, I learned how resilient I am. I discovered my inner strength because I went through Hell and made it out on my own. It sounds dramatic, but there are several times my life could’ve ended in those ten years, and those are just instances that I am aware of. So when I find myself thinking about how I took the long way to just get back to square one, I’m reminded of the quote “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”, and nobody knows that better than a taxidermist.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
